Books
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Life Is Simple, JohnJoe McFadden (ISBN 978-1-529-36495-8, Basic Books)
I started reading this book at the end of August and only just finished it yesterday. My wife bought it at Dominicanen in Maastricht during our visit there in July and read it on vacation. She asked me to read it as well so we could exchange thoughts about it. The book is a history…
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Boekhandel Dominicanen
Een tijdje geleden bezochten we Maastricht en een bezoek aan Boekhandel Dominicanen kon dan niet ontbreken. Deze boekhandel vestigde zich in 2006 in een oude Dominicanenkerk. Het gebouw alleen al is een bezoek waard zelfs als je geen interesse hebt in boeken. Voor wie wel op zoek naar boeken kan ik deze boekhandel ook aanraden.…
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The Hot Zone, Richard Preston (ISBN 978-0552171649, Transworld Publishers)
A true story about an outbreak of an Ebola ‘variant’ in the US, Reston virus near Washington DC. The book has been criticised for sensationalizing the physical effects of Ebola and Marburg with people bleeding out and decomposing and turning into a bag of liquid. That is the graphical image you get from the cases…
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Discovering The Expanding Universe, Harry Nussbaumer and Lydia Bieri (ISBN 978-0-521-51484-2, CUP)
This book from Cambridge University Press was first published in 2009. As the title suggests this is a history of how the expanding universe was discovered. Although all mathematics are banned to an appendix you should not expect a typical popular science book. The 187 pages spread over 18 short chapters deal with the most…
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Men of Mathematics, Eric Temple Bell (ISBN 978-0-6716-2818-5, Simon & Schuster)
A ‘classic’ from 1937. The subtitle is ‘The Lives and Achievements of the Great Mathematicians from Zeno to Poincaré’. This is not completely correct as the last chapter is dedicated to Cantor and not to Poincaré. The penultimate chapter is for Poincaré. The first chapter is as usual an introduction and Zeno is tackled in…
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De architecten van ASML, René Raaijmakers (ISBN 978-9082579826, Techwatch Books)
Ik kwam een verwijzing naar dit boek tegen op het LinkedIn kanaal van ASML. Aanleiding was de Chinese vertaling van dit boek. Ik had hiervoor al met veel plezier Natlab gelezen dus was de beslissing om dit boek te kopen en te lezen snel genomen. En ik heb er zeker geen spijt van gehad. De…
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A History of Pi, Petr Beckmann (ISBN 978-0312381851, St Martin’s Press)
(a history of) Pi first came out in 1970 and the author was a professor of electrical engineering at the University of Colorado. Beckmann fled Czechoslovakia at the age of 14 to escape the Nazis. In the introduction Beckmann states that he could write his own personal history of pi without having to worry about…
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Familiar Words From 1974
I started reading {a history of} π again yesterday. I read this some 12 years ago but wanted to read it again as I am going through some algebra fundamentals helping my daughter with her math exams. Almost 50 years ago, in the preface to the third edition from 1974 author Petr Beckmann wrote the…
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Genius. The Life and Science of Richard Feynman, James Gleick (ISBN 978-0679747048, Vintage)
After having reread the collected Feynman anecdotes from Surely You’re Joking and What do you care ? in the Classic Feynman edition I wanted to reread this biography by James Gleick again. The main reason being that the anecdotes focus on stories that happened to Feynman leaving out most of the science. Originally I read…
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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, J.K. Rowling (ISBN 978-1408855676, Bloomsbury)
The third Harry Potter book. As you probably know each Potter book follows Harry during a year at Hogwarts school of Magic. So, in book 1 he was 11 years old and going to his first year. In The Prisoner of Azkaban we meet Harry during the summer at his uncle and aunt awaiting the…
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